Tenants with attorneys can cause problems for the landlord — but honestly, they cause even bigger problems for the tenants themselves. And I want to talk about why.
First, let me be clear: do I think tenants should have attorneys? Yes, absolutely. If a tenant is facing an eviction or has a real dispute with a landlord, they should have representation. I don’t even have a problem with the free attorney programs that provide counsel to tenants who can’t afford it. That’s a good thing.
Where it becomes a problem is what it does to the tenant’s mindset.
The “My Attorney Will Save Me” Problem
Once a tenant has an attorney — often for the first time in their life — they get this idea that the attorney is going to make everything go away. Or better yet, that the attorney is going to somehow get them money out of the situation.
Neither of those things is true.
Tenants don’t get to just decide not to pay rent. If there’s a legitimate habitability issue and a bad landlord, that’s a different conversation — and yes, there are plenty of bad landlords in Philadelphia. I see them every day. Probably a quarter of the distressed properties that get onboarded to my property management company, the actual problem is the owner, not the tenant. I’ll own that.
But in most cases where we’re dealing with a non-paying tenant with an attorney, it’s just a tenant who has decided they don’t feel like paying rent. And the attorney showing up gives them a false sense that this is all going to work out in their favor.
What Actually Happens to the Tenant
Here’s what the tenant doesn’t understand — and what a good attorney would explain to them:
- We report credit activity, both good and bad, to the credit bureaus.
- We put unpaid balances into collections.
- We pursue eviction and we get eviction judgments.
- All of this stays on their record for roughly the next seven years.
That’s going to make it very difficult to finance a car, finance a home, or rent a decent property. They’re not coming back to a company like mine after an eviction and a collections account — we screen, and we’re going to say no. Their options become slumlords who don’t screen, in properties nobody should live in. Some employers even run credit and background checks now.
None of that goes away because they have an attorney standing next to them.
The Problem With Free Attorneys
I want to be careful here because I do support tenants having representation. But the reality of these free attorney programs is that you’re often dealing with attorneys who are volunteering their time or being severely underpaid. They typically don’t specialize in landlord-tenant law.
In all my years managing rentals in Philadelphia, I can think of exactly one time where I saw a genuinely competent attorney representing a tenant. The rest? They either didn’t understand landlord-tenant law, didn’t care, or weren’t taking their fiduciary responsibility seriously.
I had a conversation with one yesterday who had no clue what he was talking about. When we get to court, it’s going to be a disaster for his client — but right now, that tenant is walking around thinking they’ve got this in the bag.
How This Hurts the Landlord Too
From the landlord side, our normal collections process works like this: we start friendly. A gentle reminder that the rent’s a little late. If it escalates, the messages escalate — we tell them what’s coming next, we give them dates, we give them a chance to make it right before we file. Most of the time, that process gets people paid or gets them out.
When an attorney enters the picture and tells the tenant “don’t worry about it,” all of that communication breaks down. You can’t negotiate with someone who genuinely believes none of the consequences are real. This is one of the reasons I say the rent collection process matters so much — and why it falls apart when a tenant is being told bad information.
What a GOOD Tenant Attorney Would Do
A competent attorney representing a tenant who can’t or won’t pay rent would come to us and say something like: “My client can’t pay. They’ll be out in 20 days if you’re willing to forgive the balance and not pursue the judgment.”
That’s essentially cash for keys — a real estate investing term you may have heard. And in most cases, we’d say yes. Why? Because getting the property back in 20 days saves our owner thousands of dollars in legal fees and three or four months of lost rent going through the full eviction process. It’s a win for everyone.
A bad attorney doesn’t have that conversation. A bad attorney lets their client sit in the property, rack up more debt, destroy their credit, and end up with an eviction judgment anyway — just three months later and with a much bigger hole to climb out of.
The Bottom Line for Landlords
If you own rentals in Philadelphia, expect to run into this. When a tenant with a poorly-informed attorney is on the other side, you’re going to face additional hurdles — not because the law changed, but because the tenant’s mindset has been distorted. They think they have an adult in the room, and often they don’t.
Your best defense is what it always is: screen tenants properly before they move in, document everything, follow your process consistently, and don’t let false confidence on the other side push you off your plan. The credit reporting, the collections, the judgment — those tools work whether the tenant believes in them or not.
I’m just a humble Philadelphia property management company owner doing my very best to answer your rental property investing questions. As always, happy rental property investing.
